HDD noise is inevitable, and best approach is using SSD instead.
I am wondering…
Chia isn’t look up for whole plot for prove. And base on that, is there any way to gather all plots headers and store them on SSD? When it needs to examine for a prove then let HDD do its work?
IF this works, then it can reduce noticeable amount of noise from HDD, increase it’s lifetime, and may find some purpose for my lonely SSD…
That sounds quite interesting. Im interested to hear about this possibly
I can see perhaps increasing lifetime (idling, not seeking more), and making a use for an ssd, but how can it reduce noise? As in, does seeking on your drives make so much racket? Mine are all uber quiet, regardless of what they do.
I need a 25TB SSD for $200.00 
My understanding (could be wrong) is that the Chia sw already does cache enough info already to know if the plot passes the initial filter, and only if it does, does it it access the actual file for more. Then based on that it looks at some random areas in the file, so difficult to cache that, though not totally impossible to do 
at least in part.
Seagate Exos X16’s I have do make some noise (thud/click every block) but every other drive I have is pretty much silent. Not sure on the other Exos range, but X16 do make noise.
If you use 2.5" drives instead of 3.5" drives there is almost no noise. I run my farm that way and it is silent.
It is a lot cheaper then buying SSDs but currently you are limited to 5 TB 
Still need a 25TB SSD for $200.00 
This mechanism is already built in from my understanding. This is why a challenge has to pass the filter before it can proceed to proof evaluation which needs to read a specific area of the plot after finding out what needs to be read from index. This process is fast even on regular spinner drive and in my case with USB drives it is 0.5s avg.
These drives are super noisy compared to other Ent. options.
In general I suggest using <7200rpm drives like the consumer lvl raid HDDs (ex WD REDs) but these tent to be more expensive so instead you can consider USB drives which typically are much much less expensive and <7200rpm. This is why most of my drives are USB.
The thing with spinners is that you want to keep them spinning 24/7 and prevent the spindle from stopping as that will extend the life of the drive. Some drives have 2 power states when active which decreases the power useage when the drive is not reading but again you want to prevent the spin down.
SSDs are unfortunately not economically viable compared to spinners.
You have terrible wattage per tb, and less tb per (usb) connection. I wouldn’t recommend 2.5 drives at all.
That helps a lot with noise reduction and life expectancy. You need to use KeepaliveHD on Windows or a custom script on Linux, to write on the disk every X seconds.
They arent economically viable yet, but you can always recycle old plotting SSDs into farming drives at no extra cost and they have their own advantages (such as no electricity cost).
On Windows, I wrote a keepalive.bat script, that includes the following commands:
chia plots show: whose output is used for the “find” command.
find: which works similar to grep, to grab a list of drives being harvested.
for: which works similar to Linux “for”, to write a few bytes to each directory that “find” found.
timeout: works similar to Linux “sleep”
%0% to repeat
It will write to every drive that “chia plots show” outputs. That might be overkill (for drives that do not sleep). But it should not matter. You can use “find” with the -v option, to exclude drives. But the find command does not allow multiple search strings (grep does, but find does not). So if you want to exclude lots of drives, you would have to pipe find -v over and over.
I am not on my Chia computer. But if anyone is interested, I will post the exact contents of the script.
The PC I am on right now is not networked to my Chia rigs. I keep them isolated. I need to use sneaker-net to get the script and post it here.
I prefer using my own script, because I do not like to trust 3rd party software, unless it is the only available solution.
Sure I would love that, I use keepalivehd because it’s simple and open source but I’m all for custom scripts.
@aurelius
cls
chia plots show | find “mounts” > chia_plots_show-results.txt
for /f %%i in (chia_plots_show-results.txt) do dir/b %%i
for /f %%i in (chia_plots_show-results.txt) do echo %%i\test > %%i\test.txt
@timeout /nobreak /t 100
%0%
In my case, the “find” command is filtering by “mounts” (which is the directory that I have all of my plotted drives mounted in. So substitute your own unique string to isolate the lines containing only your list of plot directories.
Also, I issue the “for” command twice.
The first one will not keep your drives from sleeping. I have it there because I like to see it list my plots. It confirms that it is reading the drives.
In the second instance of the “for” command, I write a few characters to test.txt in each plot directory. Change that to whatever you want.
The “timeout” /nobreak option is there to prevent me from accidentally triggering it to restart via a key press. You can remove /nobreak if you want a key press to kick off the script, again, before the countdown completes. I chose 100 seconds. Change that to fit your needs.
This site put “timeout” in bold, probably due to the “@” symbol (not because I was emphasizing anything). I cannot unbold it.
By the way, as you can see, the Windows “find” command requires all types of specific arguments with symbols that Linux’s grep does not put you through.
Yes, agree, I have about 25-30 2.5" 5TB drives as part of my farm.
I disagree in some ways. All of my 2.5" USB powered external drives use less than 200mA at idle - that’s 1W at their 5V supply. Max they ever use is less than 900mA which is less than 4.5W when they are doing continuous reads or writes (which they are not, apart from the initial plot copy process to the drive).
The 2.5" 5TB drives I have have also been amongst the cheapest cost/TB drives, and there is no lack of USB ports on any modern system or should you wish to use USB hubs. In may case though, I have my farm spread across 11 different PC systems with each having 8 or more USB ports so I am not out of ports yet either.
All I would say is don’t dismiss 2.5" 5TB USB drives if your setup suits this.
The cost per tb is the same for 2.5 drives and 3.5. You should add the cost of electricity for your 11 computers and the electrical consumption for your usb hubs. I’ve experimented with small 2.5 drives and what I measured was 2-3x the consumption per tb of 3.5 drives with 14tb and up.
Not in my case - I got a bulk discount.
The 11 PC’s are at present also mining Ethereum, Raptoreum, Alephium and Toncoin. So the overhead of Chia is negligable. I don’t use USB hubs yet as I have no need.